Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 08.03.14
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 14:13-21
It’s rolling into late summer, and that means engaging with a favorite late summer pastime with my boys. The wild bustle of the summer shuttling has reached the August doldrums, which means we finally have time to look around at the clutter and mess of the house, and begin the summer kid junk deletion.
Every year, we sort through the piles of debris that have built up and gathered, the old abandoned mess that has accreted into our lives over the years. It’s fun, actually, like flipping through a scrapbook, the kind of chore that the kids volunteer for. I remember when I got this! I remember when we were there!
The flow of stuff into the lives of our children isn’t like a water fountain of possessions. It’s like a water cannon, one of those truck-mounted jobbies that you use to extinguish burning aircraft or knock down rioters. The next time we have a water fight with the Baptists down the street, we are so going to rent one of those.
It’s such a great wash of things that it seems sometimes to overwhelm us. Cleaning out the results of that flow is both satisfying and necessary, as vital to our home as dreaming is to our minds, or defragging is to a hard drive.
Last year, during the summer, we cleared out the stuff they’d outgrown, and didn’t need or want. The year before, during the summer, we cleared out the stuff they didn’t need or want. And yet, still and all, when we went this week to clear out the stuff they didn’t need or want, there was a full thirty-two gallon garbage bag of stuff that was so useless and broken that it couldn’t even be donated.
Which, of course, we were keeping around the house, neatly stored in bins. Or, rather, not so neatly stored, but it was in bins. Mostly.
And yet here we are, in a society with so much that we struggle to know what to do with it, so much that we spend, according to the Self Storage Association of America, twenty-four billion dollars a year in the United States to rent space in one of the almost fifty thousand storage facilities in this country, where we stash the things we don’t have room for in our overstuffed homes. What we have here in America is a choking overabundance.
The desperate irony is that we are taught to feel, somehow, that this is not quite enough. There’s still this carefully taught hunger, this sense that somehow what we have doesn’t cut it, a sense that is reinforced every time we’re bombarded with carefully targeted ads whenever we connect with the news or sit down to share baby pictures and arguments about Gaza on Facebook. Here is the car you do not have! Here are more shoes!
We are a society that, even in the face of having everything we could possibly need, is taught to be ever anxious. Even more, so many of us feel deeply and radically alone, isolated from one another, distrustful of one another. Here we are, connected to the whole world, with our thousand and four Facebook friends and millions of human beings there for us to connect with, and yet we feel more isolated and lonely than ever. Anxiety can consume us, doubt at our ability to spread graciousness in the world tears at us, and we can despair.
Just as the disciples despaired, as they looked out into the crowds that surrounded in the gathering darkness of evening.
This story, of the loaves and the fishes, may be a familiar tale. It is retold by all of the Gospels, but it’s got a couple of unusual and noteworthy elements. First, it’s a really rather amazingly simple event. It’s visceral, a fundamentally graspable and elemental thing, the stuff of the every day.
What it’s not is a hugely impressive mega-miracle, the sort of thing that would strike you as amazing the moment you saw it. It’s nothing wild and supernatural, not a pillar of fire, not the Red Sea parting, not the 113th Congress actually getting something done. You’d barely have even noticed, if you were there watching.
Up at the front, you’d have seen Jesus speaking a blessing, and then the disciples taking what little food they had and starting to share it with those around them. Nothing glorious or striking about it. It’s just that there was food, and everyone got fed.
Which is a miracle in and of itself, the sort of miracle we blunder right on by pretty much every day. The yellow light from a G-class star falls on our rocky world. In a wildly complex organic response, those photons awake grains, which rise up tall and golden and rich with life to meet that light. Even more complicated organic beings systematically harvest those grains, which they’ve somehow learned to grind and mix and heat and mix with other organisms to make it rise. Bread. So simple. So taken for granted, though it is part of the miracle of life itself and the glorious abundance of God’s creation. That miracle we miss, even though it is amazing and wondrous.
Being a vegetarian and all, I won’t talk about the fish half of the equation. Poor little fishies. Snif.
There was food, and everyone got fed. Everyone.
That second part was what the disciples struggled with. Here in Matthew’s telling of the story, he and Mark speak the same truth. They’ve gone to a “lonely place,” a place away from the crowds, for the sole purpose of getting away from the hubbub for a little while.
But the crowds have followed, setting out to hear this prophet, this teacher, this wonderworker. The day was growing late, and the disciples, seeing the throngs, were eager to wrap things up and get people home. That, and they were worried, because out there in the wild, there was no way they could insure everyone got fed. Here they were in the wilderness, with nary a Burger King or Dennys in sight.
How can we know they’ve got food? We have food, sure, but they might not. They are anxious about the gathering, anxious that hungry crowds might lose sight of their message, anxious that there will not be enough.
Which, Jesus knew, there was.
In the face of their anxiety about what they had, Jesus told them: give it away. Break the bread. Cook the fish. Share it with a blessing.
And sure, you can read this as the more traditional miracle if you so choose, as if Scotty had beamed down a replicator from the Enterprise and they were cranking out copies of loaves and tilapia.
I tend to see the miracle that spread through the crowd not as the fish or the bread, but the blessing that rode with it. Here, Jesus insures that everyone will be fed by graciously, confidently sharing what they had, and sending the blessing of that sharing out into the throng.
Because while the disciples did not trust either their own resources or the resources of others, Jesus did. Here, a crowd has come to learn about the grace of the Kingdom. They’ve gone into the wilderness.
Jesus knew: you do not go into the wilderness without food. I mean, seriously, my family can’t take any trip of more than twenty minutes without bringing along provisions. If you’re going on a trip of indefinite duration, wandering into the desert, you’re going to bring a snack.
This Jesus knew. And the start of that miracle was the act of turning around, not worrying about it, and sharing graciously. If that alone was what Jesus did that evening, if all that happened was that through an act of grace, grace spread through every person gathered there and everyone shared in what they had without anxiety or grasping, that in and of itself is quite a miracle.
We who have so much poured out to us, and in whom so much potential lies, we need to trust that sort of miracle in us.
Some miracles are just right there, ready to happen, just waiting to be seen and acted upon. The joy of life, of growing and giving and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given? That’s the deepest of miracles. But first, we have to be able to see it through the thickets of our anxiety, and the depths of our grasping. When we are choking on our plenty, we need to trust that
Know that you have the grace in you to pass along that blessing. Trust that others have the grace in them to do the same.
And let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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